Mike Myers was designated for assignment by the Yankees today, and what at first seems a puzzling move makes sense when you look at the details.

At first, you say HEY he's got a 2.66 ERA (compared to league ERA of 4.29, he's got a reasonable WHIP of 1.33, and he's left-handed. Why the heck would the Yankees want to give up on him?

Myers' Play Index splits page tells the rest of the story. Left-handed relievers have pretty much just one job in baseball, and that's to get out left-handed batters. For example, many felt that the Yankees signed Myers last year expressly to deal with David Ortiz. In Myers' long career, he's got an excellent .218 batting average against by left-handed batters. But that includes slumping last year to .257 against lefties, which was his career-worst mark at the time, before this year's horror show performance of .312 against lefties.

This led Torre to be unable to use Myers as a lefty-specialist. In 2004, Myers appeared in 75 games, pitching 42.2 innings (averaging less than 2 outs per appearance), 2005 he appeared in 65 games while pitching 37.1 innings (averaging just over 1 out per appearance), and in 2006 it was 62 games pitching 30.2 innings (averaging even less than 1 out per appearance--think about how that is achieved.) But here in 2007, he's been in 55 games and racked up 40.2innings, averaging well over 2 outs per appearance. He's also already thrown more pitches this season than he did in 3 of the last 4 full seasons.

So basically, he became as useful as an ordinary right-handed reliever this year. Unable to get lefties out and already having thrown his usual number of pitches and innings for a full season, he is no longer useful.

One other tidbit of interest is Myers' actual performance against David Ortiz (gleaned from his PI batter-vs-pitcher page.) In 2006, they squared off 10 times. That may not seem like a lot until you realize that Myers never faced him more than once per game, meaning that Myers was brought in just to face Ortiz in more than half of the meetings between the Red Sox and Yankees last year. That's amazing. That's also how the Yankees wanted to use Myers this year, but to no avail.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.